According to Reuters EU fined Microsoft for 280.5 million euros today for non-compliance with a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling. The penalty comes on top of a 497 million euro fine the Commission imposed on Microsoft in March 2004 for abusing its dominant position. The new fine covers the period from Dec. 16, 2005, the deadline set by EU regulators for Microsoft to make available key information to rivals, to June 20. 2006. Microsoft says it has made huge efforts to comply with the Commission's 2004 ruling and has 300 people working to meet the requirements from EU. In 2004, the EU Commission ruled Microsoft pressing out rivals by withholding technical information that would help the rivals make server software run as smoothly on Microsoft Windows operating system as their own server software does.

So the question is if these fines will help us Architects in a better direction and make compliance between MS and non-MS Software further and better? I hope it will, not because of the fines since MS makes much more millions per day than the fines, but because of the principles set down by consumers and others vendors and now legally supported by EU! An interesting point will be the (mostly invisible) political war between US and EU on the political arena and which consequences the development will have for the transatlantic relationship.

In next year MSs new operating system Vista with the new Office 2007 will be ready and maybe it will be a new era in MSs dominant position?

I will thank u guys for having interest in my blog and I am now starting my summer-holidays after a warm summer-period with a very thrilling and time consuming World Cup, where my favorite team Italy won: -) In this context, check out this free online game.

I have just ended the project proposal for a SOA-preanalysis targeted our project board, where we are asking for resources and commitment. The SOA-preanalysis will contain strategic direction for SOA, economy, business and technological benefits and challenges in our organization. Our Chief Architect and I have from mid august arranged Workshops for our executives from the steering comitee of the EA-programme. In the Workshops will there be presentations by executives from the danish federal authority of taxes (SKAT), one of Denmarks leading financial groups and one of the leading suppliers of corporate pension schemes in Denmark about SOA from a business and strategic view. The purpose of the Workshops is to dress up our executives and give inspiration to our SOA-strategy.

Regards Asim Hanif :-)

In November 2005 I participated in a speech by
Bob Sutor, who is IBMs Vice President of Standards and Open Source. Though the speech was attained by a lot of Open Source-geeks (I am not an open-source geek!), Bob made a point, which had an effect on me: If I write a document in my hands, the document is my property and I can distribute it to anyone whom I wish to and the receiving person can read it. The same should be the case in electronic documents. There is no doubt about that Microsoft has the most used Office-applications and if you create a document with MS Word, the document is not fully yours, because the document will only could be red by persons having MS Word. The same case is in government. The major parts of governmental institutions make their electronic documents with MS Word and send them to their citizens in .doc-formats. By this, they as governmental institutions, who should be neutral and independent, press us citizens to buy the Office-pack from one of the worlds largest and most capitalistic firms and then supporting its market share and keeping other vendors out. Can it be true?

A major initiative about above is the ODF or OpenDocument format, which is an open, XML-based document format by OASIS. There has been a lot of discussions about Microsofts support of it. One of the latest news is that Microsoft have launched the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge, which is a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects. The Open XML Translator will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in ODF. The ODF-converter will be available as an add-in for different versions of Microsoft Office and the Office 2007 will be based on Microsofts format Open Office XML. However OASISs ODF and Microsoft Open Office XML are two different standards, which is another interesting discussion.

Today the Open XML Translator project has released a prototype of the add-in. The goal is to have a Word plug-in for Office 2007 by the end of this year and translators for Excel and PowerPoint next year. The add-in can be downloaded free from here. I have tried to install the converter, but in its first release (0.1 - prototype), you can only convert documents from ODF to OpenXML. This can be done either with the Word Add-in (which requires both .NET Framewok 2.0 and Word 2007) or through the command line tool, which requires .NET framework 2.0.

So there for, there is a long journey until I can own my own documents created by MS Office without requiring that my readers must use MS Office. So maybe I should use the free OpenOffice in the future, which supports ODF? But my readers, who only have MS Office and not OpenOffice, will not could read my documents created in OpenOffice...

One of our aims is to connect our EA-programme closer to the business. One of methods for this is to work with business blueprints. Yesterday we have a meeting with Kristian-Hjort Madsen about business blueprinting inspired by U. S. Department of the Interior (DOI). The EA-programme of DOI is the most business oriented EA-programme in the federal U.S.

The EA-proces of DOI is based on the four steps of Vision, Inventory, Analysis and Take action

The result of the last step is take-action modernization blueprints, which documents the transistion for each LOB. The modernization blueprints are based on the Methodology for Business Tranformation (MBT), which leverages the DOI EA Repository (DEAR-website) to support findings and recommendations for the EA-transistion. The DOI EA repository is related to the six DOI Reference models, which confirms to the five FEA-reference models.

So is the EA-transition of DOI based on the Methodology for Business Tranformation(MBT). The MBT consists of the three major parts of Creation, Implementation and Maintaining of the Modernization Blueprints. The first part consists of the following five steps:

Step 1: Perform Modernization Blueprint Modernization Tasks
Step 2: Determine Scope and Set Business and Vision Strategy
Step 3: Analyze the Business
Step 4: Analyze the Information Technology
Step 5: Author Blueprint, Obtain IRB Approval, and Appoint Executive Sponsor Nominee

The purpose of Business Blueprinting is to support the business and organizational change and it is then a more business oriented EA-method. Traditional EA-methods focuses much on To-be documentation and principles and reference architectures for business, while business blueprints focuses more on supporting and structuring the business change while the as-is documentation of the systems is done. The organizational and business change is inevitable and will be done under all circumstance, but by Business Bleprinting we Architects can support the change by structuring the change process and then show our real value to the business. Another aspect is that Business Blueprint is not equal to change management, which is managed by the traditional change theory as for example Kotter and Huy, but the business blueprints can structure the change proces and link it closer to the business. Therefor must business blueprints be combined with change management initiatives for changing culture, thoughts etc. Some of the important points in business blueprinting are:

- Do not focus on the whole Enterprise at once and therefor start with one or two LOBs as pilot-projects
- The work should be done decentralized anchored at the business
- It is important to involve all the relevant stakeholders incl. top management
- We architects should not define the business, but only structure the change process and proactively link the change process to the it-infrastructure (it-enabling the change process).

My point supported by the others is that the assumption of all this is that the business itself must ask for change. My experience is the most business departments are focused on the operational day-today work and are comfortable of the as-is organizational and business situation. Until there is a need for change of the business forced by their surroudings and pressed by the top management, this process is without gain. The need of change is after my meaning one the largest differencies between most of the public sector with few exceptions and the private sector as for example for sales or technical organizations.

In our organization the top management is preparing a new business strategy and we expect to use business blueprints as a tool for leavering the new business strategy.

The work of the National IT and Telecom Agency (OIO) is not business focused enough today and Kristian is therefor working for implementing some of the mentioned thougts in their EA-method and EA-scenarious.